Puerto Ayora and Preparation for the Longest Sailing Leg on Earth
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sun 9 Mar 2008 13:52
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00:44.827S 90:18.414W
Attached are two pictures. The first was
taken from our boat, looking out at all the other rally and non-rally boats
anchored here in Academy Bay. The second is the fish market in town.
Note the fish piled on the ground and on the table to the right, and the four or
five pelicans lined up behind the man in the white shirt - waiting for some
tasty scraps to come their way.
We are leaving Sunday (3/9) on the longest sailing
leg on earth. Ok, not really. We are leaving, and it will be the
longest sailing leg of the whole trip at approximately 2,980 miles, but it's
probably not the longest sailing leg on earth - it will only feel that way to
us. We expect it to take about three weeks. Wow. Three weeks
is a lot longer than nine days. Nine days is the longest sailing leg we've
completed so far (Norfolk to St. Thomas). We are pretty sure we'll survive
just fine, but we are hoping not to do a lot of motorslogging for a couple
of reasons...
First, we never received the new seal for our
transmission because it never shipped. The company Don was working with
via email asked us four days running to confirm the shipment. Since we
only download email once per day, we didn't realize they didn't ship after each
time we confirmed because we didn't pick up new emails until 24 hours
later. We are not sure why they were so reluctant to ship, it might have
had something to do with the $350ish shipping cost. In the end, Don said forget it...it's not worth the
close to $1,000 it would take to purchase, ship and pay duty on the stupid seal
(that probably only costs a few bucks to produce) and he canceled the
order. So, what will we do you ask? Never fear, Super Don, the
fixit man is here. Don concocted a new seal out of two o-rings supplied
very kindly to us for the cost of a bottle of wine from a non-rally
boater anchored close by. A couple of o-rings, some silicone grease and we
are ready to go. It's not that we don't have faith in Super Don's
concocted transmission seal....but we plan to try very hard not to run our
engine endlessly like we did during the famous motorslog. If it takes us
longer than three weeks to get to the Marquesas, so be it. We have enough
food on board to last us three months. And if things get really tough, we
did buy some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in case of emergency. Also, there
is no rally-related deadline until Tahiti, and we've got until April 30th to get
there. In the meantime, rally boats will be cruising on their own
throughout the Marquesas and Tuamotu island groups on the way to Tahiti.
Sounds good to us. We could use a little R&R anchored in a beautiful
bay off some exotic and unpopulated island. We haven't been able to do
that since before the rally started when we were in Martinique (which is
populated, of course, but still nice). I know, I know, your hearts
collectively bleed for us.
Second, even if we attempted to motorslog all the
way to the Marquesas, we wouldn't make it. Neither we, or any other
sailboat we are aware of has enough fuel capacity to motor 2,980
miles.
So we will sail. We may sail very slowly, but
we will do our best. The weather forecast we received today
(Saturday) as part of our pre-departure 'skipper's briefing' was
not encouraging. No high winds or scary storms. Oh no. Just
the opposite. Until we get far enough south, there will be very little
wind. Far enough south has been defined as 5 degrees latitude.
We are now at 0 degrees 44 minutes latitude. That means we would have to
head due south for roughly 260 miles to hopefully pick up some wind.
That's close to three days at a very slow pace. And we won't head directly
south, the routing advice we received suggested we head southwest as best
we can until we hit 5 degrees latitude. Heading southwest means a
longer distance, but not necessarily a longer time before we pick up good
wind. We have agreed that we will tough it out even if it means a few days
with very little progress.
That's the weather forecast. Now, moving on
to fuel. Because we motored so much getting here from Ecuador, we were
down about 100 gallons of fuel. Originally, we were set up to receive fuel
from a fuel barge that would come directly to our boat at anchor. However,
because we heard bad things from other boaters concerning the quality of this
fuel (water and general debris mixed in with the diesel) and because the cost of
this barge fuel is $2.35/gallon (not a bad price when compared with prices in
the US, but high for Ecuador), we decided we would be better off lugging fuel to
our boat by jerry jug. I've described the jerry jug lugging process in a
previous blog entry from Panama. But this was jerry jug lugging on a
whole new level. In Panama, we (really my brother Bill) lugged a
couple of jerry jugs from the fuel dock to our boat (a long walk). Then
the marina, taking pity on us, used their dinghy to deliver the rest of the
jerry jugs directly to our boat. That time we only needed about 30
gallons. This time we needed three times that amount and the
process was much more complex...
First, we pooled resources with several other boats
and collected about 20, five gallon jerry jugs. Then, we hailed a water
taxi and four of us (Don, myself and Suzanne and Michael from the American boat
Maalmani) jumped in a water taxi with our 20 jerry cans and then unloaded
them all onto the dock. From there, we hailed a taxi (all of them here are
double cab 4x4's, which was perfect for what we had to do) and Suzanne and
Michael made the first trip to the gas station to fill the 20 jerry jugs.
Once they arrived at the gas station (where the price for diesel was
$1.02/gallon, by the way), they had to visit the Fuel Administrator in her
office at the gas station, and obtain permission to purchase 100 gallons of
diesel (seriously, we had to get permission before they would pump the fuel -
and not just us, everyone had to do this). The taxi driver filled the
jerry jugs, Suzanne and Michael paid in cash (a very common occurrence here in
the Galapagos where we have not used our credit card once) and headed back to
the dock where Don and I were waiting. From there we lugged the full jerry
jugs to a water taxi (and pretty much filled the water taxi to capacity) and
motored out to Maalmani. Once we arrived at the boat, we lifted all 20
jerry cans from the water taxi up onto the deck of the boat - without losing any
overboard. Once that was successfully completed, Don and Suzanne dumped
all 100 gallons into Maalmani (not a fast process) and we repeated the entire
sequence of events, this time dumping the 100 gallons into Harmonie. As a
side note, Don and Michael mysteriously disappeared while Suzanne and I were at
the gas station, which left the two of us weakling women to lug the jerry jugs
from the land taxi to the water taxi and then up onto the deck of Harmonie (we
did get help from sympathetic taxi drivers). The men folk showed up on
Harmonie sporting some new fishing gear after Suzanne and I had already emptied
a good number of the jerry jugs into the tank. Don finished the empting
task and we then repeated the entire sequence of events for a third
time. This was done such that we could return the jugs to their
owners full of diesel as thanks for their use (BlueFlyer and
Graptolite paid for the fuel, but we paid with our sweat and labor to fill
them). So, in that fashion, the four of us lugged a total of 300 gallons
to a total of four boats. This entire endeavor took us from 8am to 3:30pm
to complete on Friday. And all done in the usual sweltering heat.
Again, I know, your collective hearts bleed for us. Can't beat that
$1.02/gallon though, can you?
That's the weather forecast and the fueling
story. Now food. We did manage to scrape up enough of the
leftover produce at the farmer's market on Saturday to last us maybe half the
trip. The other half of the trip will involve canned fruit and frozen
vegetables. Puerto Ayora is a very small town with only one small grocery
store. The Blue Water Rally left earlier in the week for the Marquesas, so
the food store had already gotten one good workout. Next, crew from
our forty rally boats hit the food store like a plague of locusts. Don and
I checked the store out at 2pm on Saturday and there was literally nothing
left on the shelves except some rotted produce, a stick of butter and a
case of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Ok, it wasn't quite that bad, but it
was pretty bad. We were able to buy what we needed and truly have enough
on board to last several months - especially if Don overcomes the triple twist,
double back flip freedom move employed by fish in the Pacific.
Ok, that covers, weather, fuel and food...what's
left? Oh, right, the farewell party. Which was very nice.
Oscar was there (in his outgoing way, he has chummed up with one of the rally
employees). He did indeed go surfing, but in his quest for the perfect wave, he
managed to dislocate his shoulder. Ouch! A fast trip to the local
clinic and his shoulder was put back in place. A few tablets of valium
later, Oscar was ok. When we saw him Friday, he was in good spirits, but
the injury definitely put a damper on his Galapagos plans. He flew home on
Saturday and later that day I ran into a girl from the rally boat Kasuje.
She asked if we were the boat Oscar had sailed on (figures she would have met
him too!) and when I asked if she had heard about Oscar's shoulder, she said,
'Who hasn't? When he introduces himself, he follows the introduction up
with, 'Did you hear about what I did to my shoulder?" I think she was
exaggerating, but I giggled anyway. At the farewell party, Don and I won a
stuffed sea lion for bringing Oscar with us to the islands. We promptly
named the sea lion, what else but, Oscar. When you pinch the sea
lion's shoulder, it barks just like the real Oscar does (honest it
really does). I already described the Whitbread tribute to the blue footed
boobie in a previous blog entry - that was also one of the highlights of
the night.
So that about wraps it up. It's 4:30am Sunday
morning and I haven't been to bed yet - too busy trying to get all the blog
updates done so Don can run into town later this morning and send all the
updates at the internet place. We won't be able to send many pictures
after we set sail, so we wanted to get them all off before we left on our mega
voyage. Sorry for the long entries, but this week was jam packed with
activity and the Galapagos really deserved some blog attention. What a
fabulous place. It's unlikely that we will ever get to the Galapagos
again, but if the opportunity arises, we will certainly return. It's
everything you've ever read it would be and more. The friendly, extremely
helpful people make it just that much better.
Here's to hoping Lonesome George finally decides
that girls are interesting.
The next update will probably be on Monday when we
should be happily sailing southwest.
Anne
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